Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Backstage / Munich / Germany
Concert date: March 3, 2010
Attendance: 450
Ticket price: €24.00
Rage are Rage. They never let you down. Never. Least of all when it’s time to drop a new studio album. Ever since Victor Smolski joined, the band’s boss, the great guru and elder statesman of the orthodox school of German heavy metal, Peter “Peavy” Wagner, truly has nothing to fear for Rage’s future. Peavy himself has matured in the lineup with Victor, grown into an excellent bassist, and his voice hasn’t picked up a speck of the rust that the years might have clung to its recognizable tone. “Strings To A Web” is another excellent album, ruling with a more dynamic structure in the main arrangements that drive it. Newcomer on “Carved In Stone” and ex-Axxis drummer Andre Hilgers has loosened up even more on the new album too, and brought a lot more of the wit that comes with his know-how and the power of a true drumming wizard.
So Rage could lean back comfortably on the suspension of the rock-solid foundation that makes up the revamped trio, and cook up a truly excellent, inspired record. Great sales right out of the gate, which landed Rage in the top 30 best-selling albums in Germany after the first week, fired the band up to build a setlist entirely around the new album “Strings To A Web” (2010). And so here we are on the new tour with the band. This time in Germany!
The new hard-hitting party in the Bavarian capital was kicked off a little after eight in the evening by Hungarian trendy metallers Seven. They got the first half hour and played their own material. The band is a four-piece and mixes classic metal moves with “progressive” thrash that grew up on European soil, adding some trendy “groove” levers on top. What really sold us on them were the rocky, choppy riffs backed up by simple but noisy rhythmic turns. The guys are clearly trying to define their style, but it somehow failed to win over the crowd, who paid attention only as a polite show of support. They even worked one of the numbers into a “Purple-ish” Black Night and plodded through it their own way, that is, on a “groove riff” foundation and with a deliberately “bald” tuning. A more or less successful waste of time, which everyone in the hall was happy to forget pretty quickly. Seven tried to entertain the crowd by having the bassist grab a power drill in one song. A grinder was mounted on the drill, and he used it to scrape across the strings.
Jaded Heart, who hit the stage at nine, are cut from a completely different cloth. Going by their years in the game, they could easily play the headliner, but the problem is that their name is less recognizable on the scene today, and the albums they do release regularly get less notice. The band remains unfairly overlooked and kind of vegetates on the fringe. They’re stuck wrestling with the unfortunate “to be or not to be.” Or rather, to survive or not to survive. What drove them onto this new tour was the album “Perfect Insanity”, which came out last year on Frontiers Records. The guys were supposed to play Backstage back in November 2009, together with Brainstorm and Primal Fear, but they pulled out of the collaboration at the start of the tour after a conflict with Primal Fear, who tried to force them onto the stage at a time when the doors of the hall were still locked and there wasn’t a soul in front of the stage. The official statement from Primal Feear’s management was that Jaded Heart were unhappy with the amount of stage time available to them. Whatever the case, the guys finally got their tour. This time with Rage. They’re torchbearers of melodic hard rock. The album “Perfect Sanity” is fresh proof that Jaded Heart get harder from album to album, building their foundation more and more on crushing, massive riffs.
The band launched into their set and the new album with real vehemence, tackling the opener Love Is A Killer right away and jumping to Fly Away, the latter especially carrying the typical musical face of this band. Fahlber g was in excellent vocal form, and Oestros, Mueller and Wanner took care of the vocal harmonies, without which you can’t imagine Jaded Heart. Everything worked as normal for the band. But the people in the hall just couldn’t get into it. The sound was downright dreadful. Wherever you stood in the hall, you couldn’t hear the keyboards at all, or only caught faint hints of them now and then; the guitar riffing was pushed into the “background,” muffled and indistinct; the guitar fills were clearly audible only in parts without the rhythm section backing them. The same went for the solos. The sound was so bad that you couldn’t recognize the songs at all until their choruses. Jaded Heart fell into the trap of the otherwise wretched acoustics of the Backstage club hall, which in many ways reminds me of the venues at Ljubljana’s Metelkova. If Seven tried to entertain the crowd with a power drill, Fahlberg brought a guitar (a Fender Stratocaster) onstage at the end of the show and “smashed” it up with a few whacks against the stage. I couldn’t watch the spectacle, because my heart ached too much at such sights. But that’s the entertainment the rock music business brings. This day was special for Jaded Heart in another way, too. Peter Oestros, a true guitar wizard and master who, judging by his soloing style, belongs to the “Scandi” school of the real Malmsteen stamp, was celebrating his birthday. The crowd, together with the band, sang him a well-deserved toast!
The Jaded Heart show simply didn’t live up to expectations because of the dismal sound, but I’d bet my right arm when it comes to arguments for why this is a band that, with its rich catalog of quality releases, is still unfairly ignored and overlooked. It’s also great to see that they’re no longer weighed down by the Bormann-era material. The setlist was mostly songs from the new album, from the album “Sinister Mind”, and the song Sometimes from the album “Helluva Time”. In other words, all material taken from albums featuring the vocals of Bormann’s successor in the band, the two-meter Swedish giant Johan Fahlberg.
Even though Rage guitarist Victor Smolski said in an interview for RockLine before the show that everyone in the band was a bit nervous, since it was the first day of the new tour, with a completely different setlist that they didn’t yet know how would work with the audience, the very start of the show with the new song Edge Of Darkness blew away every skeptical thought.
Rage remain excellent onstage. Untamed rascals who, with a dynamic of daring and aggression, skin alive every die-hard defender of the ossified German school of metal as well as those who breathe power metal, and the “Smolski era” opus has also grabbed the attention of many music lovers who enjoy progressive metal with a heavy reliance on symphonic arrangements. Rage remain special in every way. Smolski is the buffer that, in just the right dose, takes the edge off the angry, direct and raw approach of the band’s charismatic boss Peavy, and the whole thing ends up sounding completely unique. A mix of great compatibility that’s wonderfully friendly and accessible to any ears that enjoy combining metal punch with melody.
Rage rolled through their show with the new songs. They seemed infallible, brilliantly tight and with a chemistry that’s all about breathing as one. Peavy is still a true stage animal, shamelessly showing off his big, long, drooling tongue, and with his carefully “wound” little beard gathered into an extended coil, you could proclaim him a spare Ramses (the Egyptian pharaoh). The singer was playful again and in excellent vocal form. Talkative as ever, he asked the audience whether they were happy with the sound, because the band knew about the “treachery” of Backstage’s acoustics. The people had long since been swept into the magic of the one-of-a-kind Rage atmosphere, forgot about analyzing the sound, and just hedonistically gulped down the Rage marches as they got fired off.
One of the highlights of the show was the suite Empty Hollow, played in full. Rage naturally got some help from a backing track here, which is nothing new at their shows anymore, since Victor Smolski would have to inherit the genotype of the monster from the new album’s cover to grow extra limbs. But the guy skillfully wriggled out of it a few times, stomping on effects pedals to trigger the synth accompaniment in the background, saved to memory beforehand.
Victor’s playing is of course a real interstellar rally that can’t leave anyone indifferent. Picturesque dangling on the tremolo, “tapping” stuffed into the solos wherever possible! Add the dynamics of his movement and a steady stream of fully lived-in grimaces. At every single moment. He upgraded the older songs in the solos, adding that typical “Smolski” symphonic touch. They were played even faster, in melodies “even more correct,” in short, real neo-classicism, tuned “the metal way.” With raging, razor-sharp “distortion.”
The band brought the crowd to its peak especially in the closing stretch with an excellent “ladder” made up of The Mirror In Your Eyes (“Ghosts”, 1999) and Wake The Nightmares (“Soundchaser”, 2003). They also rewarded all the loyal fans of the older albums with the little bonbons Light Into the Darkness (“Secrets In A Weird World”, 1989) and Medicine (“Trapped, 1992). On both, Peavy revived that old singing approach of his, which was a lot cleaner than the singing on later albums, when his vocals got more and more guttural from album to album. Rage crowned the show with an excellent Alive But Dead, from one of the most beloved Rage albums, “Black In Mind” (1995). They brought the song back into the setlist after a really, really long time, carrying the end of the regular set to its peak.
400 people in the hall enthusiastically demanded more and more. The band comes back. First they break new ground with the new Purified, with a particularly catchy and vivid chorus. With it they confirm once again their great enthusiasm for the new studio effort, and they close the show with Down (“Unitiy”, 2002), which sets Backstage fully ablaze. An hour and three quarters of classic Rage show. With their experience and know-how, the band fixed the sound picture in the hall and brought it up to a thoroughly enviable and punchy level. It certainly hit its optimum. For the available acoustic conditions of this hall, at least. Above all, with its relentless stage fury it stripped bare all the disbelieving doubting Thomases who might have wondered whether Rage could reconstruct the rich sonic picture of their studio albums (especially from the more recent period) live. What’s more, Rage are something you have to hear live. The band is in the form of its life. The new album proves that Rage don’t know how to put out a bad record, that every album is different, and that, just like in the studio, the band radiates a one-of-a-kind vibe on concert tours. Simple as that. Three masters who understand each other, who sense each other phenomenally onstage, and who chase away every barren thought of self-doubt with rich experience and routine corrections, the fruits of a long-lived career. Soundchaser has spun the web and is waiting to enchant you too with its musical magic.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
JADED HEART: 1. Love Is A Killer 2. Fly Away 3. Justice Is Deserved 4. Intro / Somewhere 5. Rising 6. Sinister Mind 7. Hero 8. Freedom Call RAGE: 1. Edge Of Darkness 2. Hunter And Prey 3. Into The Light 4. Beggar’s Last Dime 5. Drop Dead! 6. Empty Hollow 7. Straight To Hell 8. Saviour Of The Dead 9. Light Into Darkness 10. Medicine 11. MEDLEY: 11a. Lost In The Void 11b. The Mirror In Your Eyes 11c. Wake The Nightmares 12. Alive But Dead —encore— 13. Purified 14. Down
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